Men, we can't plead ignorance on sexism any longer

Over the last week, practically every woman Shane Richmond knows has
told him an awful story of an incident in which an apparently respectable,
intelligent, professional man has behaved like a slavering, slack-jawed
flasher in the park. Things need to change and fast.

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After a week of allegations against Lord Rennard, women across the UK have been opening up about their experiences of sexual assault and sexism.

Try this experiment today: ask a woman about the most horrifyingly sexist thing that has happened to her. I can be reasonably confident of two things that should shock you. First, she will have enough events to choose from that picking just one will take a moment. And second, it will be more horrifyingly sexist than you will have imagined.

Lord Greaves, Liberal Democrat peer and, apparently, amateur philosopher, pondered: "Does one proposition constitute sexual harassment?…And once there has been a refusal by the other person, how many more propositions constitute sexual harassment?"

The answers, I would think, are "very possibly, depending on how it was done" and "all of them" but more interesting is the fact that Lord Greaves seems to not know the answer.

I can't help being reminded of Seinfeld's George Costanza, caught having sex with the cleaning lady on his desk: "Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing, because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing is frowned upon... you know, cause I've worked in a lot of offices, and I tell you, people do that all the time."

At first I wondered how this happened. Who are these men and why are they behaving this way? What kind of man propositions a stranger on a train? Or lunges, tongue lolling, at a female colleague? Or approaches a female acquaintance in a bar and presses himself against her buttocks? Who are the men hanging off scaffolding, making lewd suggestions to passing women?

I want to ask them: even if you can't see women in general as deserving of your respect, don't you have a wife? Or daughters? You certainly have a mother. Are you happy that the women you care about have to roam a world filled with men like, well, like you?

In a way, it's sad. After millions of years of evolution these are still, for some men, the best ideas available. But then I started thinking about Seth Macfarlane, the Family Guy creator who opened the Oscars last weekend with a song called We Saw Your Boobs. As you've probably heard, this involved Seth, confronted with a room filled with talented women, gathered together to celebrate their best work, and telling us which ones he had seen topless.

Seth Macfarlane, the Family Guy creator

We learned that what Macfarlane took away from The Accused, in which Jodie Foster plays the victim of a gang rape, was that he got a look at a woman's breasts.

He might not have consciously intended it but the subtext of Macfarlane's song was to remind all those women that, whatever they achieve, for men like him they will never be more than a body.

It's a message reinforced everyday on Page 3 of The Sun. It's not the nudity that's the problem with Page 3, it's the context. Every single day, on the pages of what claims to be a newspaper, is an image that reminds the readers that women are simply objects.

And once you start seeing examples like that, you don't need to look far to find more. And you don't need to be a political correctness-obsessed do-gooder to be made more than a little uncomfortable by the way our culture treats half the population.